Today's personal computers have become increasingly powerful in terms of pure processing ability and their wide application of usefulness. There has been a proliferation of available external peripheral devices for use with a personal computer. In particular, flash memory cards that are removably coupled to personal computers are especially useful as portable, quick storage devices.
In the past, personal computers utilized serial buses and parallel buses as primary input/output interfaces to connect with external peripheral devices. These serial and parallel buses do not have the capability to allow the user to attach an external peripheral device to either type of bus on a personal computer and begin utilizing this peripheral device without properly configuring the computer and/or peripheral device. In other words, serial and parallel buses lack "plug and play" capabilities. Further, the existing serial and parallel buses are only optimized for only one or two peripheral devices attached to each bus.
To address the shortcomings of the serial and parallel buses, the universal serial bus architecture was introduced. The universal serial bus provides a fast bi-directional isochronous transfer of data between external peripheral devices and the computer at very low cost. Further, the universal serial bus is designed to support an unrestricted number of external peripheral devices connected to a single universal serial bus. The universal serial bus also supports "plug and play" capabilities for external peripheral devices.
One of the external peripheral devices which is well suited for use with the universal serial bus are compact flash memory cards. These compact flash memory cards provide "plug and play" capability, low power consumption, portability, and high density storage. Compact flash memory cards are well suited for digital applications such as digital camera storage, digital audio applications, and wherever rewritable, digital data storage in a portable housing is needed.
The interface portion of compact flash memory cards are uniformly configured as a fifty pin connection. The compact flash memory card with its fifty pin connection is designed to fit within either a fifty pin compact flash socket or a sixty-eight pin PCMCIA socket. However, most desktop computers do not have either the fifty pin compact flash socket or the sixty-eight pin PCMCIA socket. If a user wishes to utilize the compact flash memory device with the desktop computer, the user must purchase an expensive PCMCIA socket to connect with the desktop computer.
Another shortcoming is the inability of the compact flash memory card to be conveniently configured for operating in the universal serial bus mode, the PCMCIA mode, or the ATA IDE mode. It would be beneficial to have an adapter for a compact flash memory card that automatically configures itself to the appropriate operating mode depending upon the type of device to which the flash is connected.
What is needed is a low cost fifty pin compact flash socket interface adapter for a universal serial bus configuration to couple a compact flash memory card to a desktop computer. What is further needed is a compact flash memory card adapter that automatically detects the operating mode of the socket to which the compact flash socket interface adapter is coupled and configures the itself to the proper operating mode.